Friday, July 31, 2015

Weekend Art Challenge
Greetings,
artisans! Click through to see this weekend's art and the design
requirements for your single card submission, due Monday morning. Every
submission warrants feedback, and everyone is encouraged to give
feedback. You may use that feedback to revise your submission any number
of times, though only the version rendered will be included in the
review, if someone volunteers to render the cards.

Monday, July 27, 2015

Last week, we discussed possible mechanics for Tesla that represented the player's growth, giving you upgrades and improved abilities as the game goes on. While the idea of 'player progress' greatly excited many of you, the mechanics presented were still quite rough. Though plenty of critique was offered, not a lot of alternatives were presented because of this. This week, let's change that! Your challenge is to design a mechanic that represents the player's progress.

Friday, July 24, 2015

Weekend Art Challenge
Greetings,
artisans! Click through to see this weekend's art and the design
requirements for your single card submission, due Monday morning. Every submission warrants feedback, and everyone is encouraged to give
feedback. You may use that feedback to revise your submission any number
of times, though only the version rendered will be included in the
review, if someone volunteers to render the cards.

Thursday, July 23, 2015

Cool Card Design of the Day7/23/2015 - Today's mechanic is an iteration (appropriately enough) on yesterday's. At face-value, reverberate is comparable to rebound, but when you can fill your graveyard with reverberate cards without casting them, then getting their 'flashback' for free becomes broken.

Improve looks to tighten up that loophole by requiring a payment to 'flashback' and limiting the trigger so that it augments only copies of itself.

Hello again, everyone! As we've been looking at the mechanics that Tesla can use to represent its themes of progress, one big idea keeps coming up: players themselves progressing and improving over the course of the game. This week, let's reflect on some 'self-improvement' mechanics you all have designed, try to improve them further, and perhaps design some more mechanics capturing the same themes as well.

Friday, July 17, 2015

Weekend Art Challenge
Greetings,
artisans! Click through to see this weekend's art and the design
requirements for your single card submission, due Monday morning. Every
submission warrants feedback, and everyone is encouraged to give
feedback. You may use that feedback to revise your submission any number
of times, though only the version rendered will be included in the
review, if someone volunteers to render the cards.

Thursday, July 16, 2015

Cool Card Design of the Day7/16/2015 - I designed Primeval Force to join the ranks of cards that are reminiscent of Force of Nature, but strictly or generally better. Specifically, I wanted to include an upkeep payment that felt more like an upside than a downside.

Tuesday, July 14, 2015

Here on GA, we tend to put a lot of focus on designing individual cards and mechanics. This is great for the feedback we provide and encourage, and I think that it's a great set of development tools for all of us, especially those of us planning on competing in the next GDS. In fact, the types of designs we spend most of our time on here pushes the skills MaRo & Co. were looking at when selecting the finalists for GDS2. After the essays and the test, we had to design 10 cards that would be used to showcase a set during the course of a preview week. The emphasis was on designing one card to fill one slot that appealed to a particular type of player/reader.

Cool Card Design of the Day6/10/2015 - I think there's a small but useful vein of design space in Illusory Angel's "only if you've cast another spell this turn" mechanic, and I think red is the place to use it (because red is where lots-of-cheap-spells and storm intersect).

Monday, July 13, 2015

Hello again, everyone! Last week, I asked everyone to nominate promising mechanics that we had discussed the week before, and one mechanic clearly came out on top: Battle-Forged. Battle-Forged began long ago as 'Tune-Up', but over time, developed into the form we'll be talking about today. This week, let's strike while the iron is hot, and focus our discussion on this promising mechanic. Specifically, I'd like to hammer out the kinks with Battle-Forged, and in addition, stoke up a discussion about what the role of Battle-Forged in Tesla will be. Now, without further ado, let's begin!

Friday, July 10, 2015

Weekend Art Challenge
Greetings,
artisans! Click through to see this weekend's art and the design
requirements for your single card submission, due Monday morning. Every
submission warrants feedback, and everyone is encouraged to give
feedback. You may use that feedback to revise your submission any number
of times, though only the version rendered will be included in the
review, if someone volunteers to render the cards.

Wednesday, July 8, 2015

One of the most compelling qualities of Magic is its tremendous replay value. If you sit down two players with two sealed decks to play ten games, every one of those games will be different. Why? Because of the randomness that drives Magic.

However, the way we talk about randomness in games is often imprecise or even misleading. When we say that a card is "unpredictable", we usually conflate two similar but distinct concepts. I'd like to define and separate these ideas, so that we can say what we mean to say. (And maybe even design what we mean to design!)

Friday, July 3, 2015

Weekend Art Challenge
Greetings,
artisans! Click through to see this weekend's art and the design
requirements for your single card submission, due Monday morning. Every
submission warrants feedback, and everyone is encouraged to give
feedback. You may use that feedback to revise your submission any number
of times, though only the version rendered will be included in the
review, if someone volunteers to render the cards.

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About Us

We met as competitors and collaborators in the second Great Designer Search. After the contest was over, we decided we still had things to say about designing Magic: the Gathering. So we started a blog.